


Just Waiting

by boxparade



Series: White Blank Page [3]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen, Gender Issues, Kid Fic, Single Parents, Trans Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-19
Updated: 2016-07-19
Packaged: 2018-07-25 09:12:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,927
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7526887
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/boxparade/pseuds/boxparade
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>One of the employees comes up to ask if he needs help finding anything, and he gives a polite smile and shakes his head. “Just waiting for my kid.”</p><p>Dean doesn’t know if he says “kid” instead of “daughter” on purpose.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Just Waiting

**Author's Note:**

> Surprise, bitch! I bet you thought you'd seen the last of me.
> 
> Anyway, this came out of nowhere. I haven't been writing or reading anything in the spn fandom for over a year now (my ex used to be part of the whole thing, so...) but I've always liked this series and inspiration struck.
> 
> No promises on anything more. I'm trying (somewhat unsuccessfully) to wrap up some of my larger projects, including a 140k poly fic I've got a couple people eager to read. I'd really like to finish those projects before I commit myself to anything else.
> 
> But I figure a little sandboxing over here helps to get the creative juices flowing or whatever.
> 
> As always, unbeta'd—comments & CC welcome.

Dean tackles the unpacking one box at a time. He wishes now he’d been more organized when he shoved all this shit into the boxes in the first place, but at that point he’d mostly just wanted to get the hell out of Indiana. So now he opens a box labeled “eLectronics” (the L thick enough to cover what used to be a ‘d’) to find one of his old ZZ Top shirts balled up in the pasta bowl he’d given Lisa six Christmases ago. He sighs and laughs at the same time, tossing the T-shirt on top of another unopened, unlabeled box, to be dealt with later.

Brandy is supposed to be unpacking in the living room, but Dean thinks she found her gameboy shoved into what he thought was a harmless box of throw pillows and rugs, because she’s been suspiciously quiet for the last twenty minutes. He lets her be for his own sanity and attacks the box with the T-shirt on top.

This one legitimately seems to be filled with clothes, so he shrugs and moves to carry the entire thing upstairs to the bedrooms before he starts pulling it apart. It’s most of Brandy’s clothes, the dirty laundry mixed in with more formal outfits she hasn’t worn since she was dragged to a wedding. He lays out most of the clothes on the mattress to separate any of his clothes that might be mixed in, before they get eaten by the black hole of Brandy’s closet.

He’s mechanically tossing what must be flowery dress #9 into a pile when he pulls up short, staring at the sunflower print fabric in his hand. He sorts through his thoughts slowly, with painstaking patience and a lot less panic than he expected.

He drops the dress back into the box, shoves his hands in his pockets, and goes to find Brandy.

She’s hiding behind the couch playing her gameboy, and when Dean leans over the back of it with an amused smile on his face, she tilts her head back and stares at him with wide eyes, completely caught out.

“C’mon, kid. We’re going out.” He pulls away to go find his wallet and keys, watching out of the corner of his eye as Brandy scrambles out from behind the couch, relieved she’s not getting in trouble for playing video games when she was supposed to be unpacking.

He shepherds her into the car and has the forethought to look up the nearest mall before he picks a direction and starts driving. Brandy is quiet at first, but quickly fills in the silence after she’s really, really sure Dean’s not going to mention the gameboy. She mostly talks about the weather, and how California smells funny, and if any of the kids at school are going to know where Indiana is.

Dean lets her talk and steals quick glances at the passenger seat. She’s wearing jeans with little hearts sewn onto the back pockets, and a plain orange shirt with the weird, scrunched-up shoulders. It looks feminine in an almost subtle way, but Dean doesn’t know much about clothes anyway. He thinks Lisa probably picked it out. He swallows past a lump in his throat when he realizes that Brandy is going to outgrow every piece of clothing Lisa had ever picked out for her.

But that was inevitable, anyway.

Dean pulls into the parking lot for the mall. It looks flashy and sleek, like most things he pictures when he thinks of California. Brandy is still chattering as they make their way inside, but then she segues seamlessly into asking what they’re doing.

“Getting you new clothes for school.”

School is still a little ways off, but it’s close enough that all the shops have those “back to school” specials going on. Brandy seems a bit apprehensive the second he says it, and Dean doesn’t know where to start. They haven’t talked about Brandy’s—situation. He’s not avoiding it, or writing it off, he’s just...choosing his battles, at the moment. Maybe hoping that this doesn’t have to be a battle.

He doesn’t know which clothing stores sell what, but he sees a Gap Kids and figures, hey, it says ‘kids’ and he’s got one of those. Brandy follows him in and he makes sure to walk directly down the center of the store, not swaying to either the boys side or the girls side. He turns around and waits until Brandy looks up at him.

“So I’m old and don’t know jack about kids these days,” he says with a half-smile and shrug. “You wanna take a look around, pick out what you want?”

Brandy looks at him for a moment, then gives her own shrug and says “Okay.” Dean stands with his hands in his pockets, watching as she wanders around the store, looking at some of the tables with shirts laid out and sticking to the middle. He tries to look nonchalant and bored, so Brandy doesn’t feel—well, so she doesn’t think this is anything. Which it’s not, really.

One of the employees comes up to ask if he needs help finding anything, and he gives a polite smile and shakes his head. “Just waiting for my kid.”

Dean doesn’t know if he says “kid” instead of “daughter” on purpose.

After a few minutes, Brandy wanders back empty-handed.

“Find anything?” Dean asks hesitantly.

Brandy shrugs her shoulders and chews on her bottom lip. “Not really.”

“Okay. Another store?”

He gets a small, shy nod that seems incredibly out of character for her. Dean shoves down his gut reaction to ask what’s wrong, and leads them out of the Gap. They wander a bit further into the mall, passing by plenty of book stores and candle shops and stores with weird assortments of plastic shit in them.

He turns into a different wing, Brandy close by his side, and there are only two clothing stores in this wing. One of them is girly and pink, the other with some sort of robot decal on the windows, and Dean suppresses a near-hysterical laugh at the cliché. Brandy still seems nervous and quiet, keeping her eyes fixed down. Did she and Lisa go shopping together like this? Is this a grief thing or a—another thing?

They’re nearing the point where they have to pick a store—turn left for Girl, turn right for Boy—and Dean scrambles to figure out what to do before his eyes catch on a sunflower in the girls’ store, and _damn it._ He knows exactly why he took Brandy out for new clothes. There’s only one choice here. He just needs to man up.

Despite all the thoughts rattling around in his skull, he keeps his cool on the outside, shoulders relaxed as he veers right, marching straight through the door. Brandy follows him timidly, and Dean wishes he could just say what he was feeling and have her understand and everything would work out. But he doesn’t have the words, and this isn’t the place for that kind of conversation, anyway.

Instead he comes to a standstill in the middle of the store, surrounded by blue and black shirts with robots and ninja turtles on them, and nods his head at Brandy. “See anything you might wanna wear more than once?” he asks wryly.

Dean’s kid is smart, okay? She saw the other store, and she knows Dean led them into this one anyway. She looks up at him for a moment with a fragile kind of hope in her eyes. Dean swallows and nods again.

That’s all it takes. Brandy rushes off to the nearest shelf with cargo shorts on it, a bounce in her step, and all the tension he hadn’t known he’d been storing in his shoulders just deflates and leaves him. Brandy is a lot more successful this time, coming back and burying Dean in shirts and shorts and a bandana with some weird cartoon characters on it.

Dean boycotts a couple of the items—who the hell charges $50 for a pair of cargo shorts their kid’s gonna outgrow in half a day?—and exchanges a few for sizes that will actually fit Brandy, because no amount of wishful thinking is going to get her into that extra small dragon T-shirt.

But Brandy seems ecstatic that Dean even buys what she picks out, packed neatly into bags by a bored teenage cashier who doesn’t even look twice at either of them.

“Wanna try a few more stores?” he asks once they’re out the door, and Brandy just gives him this _look._ He sucks in a breath and forgets to let it go for a long time, listening as she squeaks out “You mean I can get _more?”_

Dean finally recovers enough to try to crack a joke about not buying the entire mall, but before he can finish Brandy is dragging him into the next store and they go through the whole routine again.

He doesn’t interfere too much with her choices beyond making sure they’re not buying her XXL shirts that reach down to her knees and keeping the prices reasonable. He does insist she get something “nice” and she looks worried until he shoves her toward the button-down shirts and khaki pants.

She finds a Kansas City Chiefs snapback and grins so wide Dean thinks it must hurt her jaw. He buys it for her without a thought and she jams it onto her still-new haircut and marches through the mall like she’s just discovered her own small country to rule over.

By the time they’ve hit up almost every store in the never-ending mall, Dean has a bag to match each of the smiles Brandy gives him, and his wallet aches a little but he thinks it’s more than a fair trade.

She’s back to talking a mile a minute as they drive home, adjusting her hat every other breath, all smiles everywhere she looks. Dean feels like he should be seeing some sort of monumental change, like he’s meeting her for the first time again, but he doesn’t. She’s happy, but she’s been this happy before. She’s got a new haircut and a new hat, but she still looks like his kid.

And his kid still has a box she promised to unpack sitting in the living room.

“Da-ad,” she whines.

“Just the one box, and then you can play video games _on_ the couch instead of hiding behind it.”

She flushes but agrees easily enough, dutifully approaching the box with a single-minded determination. Dean leaves her to it and brings her new clothes upstairs into her room.

He hangs them up next to some of her old clothes, pastel shirts and overalls with flowers on the snaps and clothes he’s not sure if she’s going to want to wear anymore, but he can’t quite bring himself to toss just yet. He does take all the dresses and shove them into a bag in the back corner of her closet. If she doesn’t touch them by the time December rolls around, he’ll give them to charity.

Dean hums to himself as he fiddles with the sticky top drawer of the dresser. “Just waiting for my kid,” he says into the empty air. Bites on the inside of his cheek and jiggles the drawer around, listening to the wood rattle stubbornly.

“Just waiting for my son.”

The drawer gives and slides open.

Eventually, he might be able to say that without his heart pounding rapidly against his ribs.


End file.
